


we're animals, it's unfortunate.

by judypoovey



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Peter taught everyone how to high-five, just IMPLIED sex, not smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2017-06-07
Packaged: 2018-11-10 10:56:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11125656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/judypoovey/pseuds/judypoovey
Summary: He really wasn’t expecting her to give him a long, stern look and say: “We need to have sex.”“Uhhhhhhhhhhhh…”“Is your brain short circuiting?” Nebula demanded. “Did the fox mis-install that implant? I can kill him for you.”





	we're animals, it's unfortunate.

**Author's Note:**

> This is so silly. I'm kind of fanscinated with their friendship dynamic and I feel like...idk. This was needed. I don't tend to write smut so it's tame in spite of the subject matter, but like. I had this really persistent idea of this happening so I had to write it. The title is from "Let's Have Intercourse" from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and also that's kinda where the concept came from. Typically I headcanon Nebula as a lesbian but I still couldn't let go of this fic, so she's a little more pan here I guess?

Nebula presumed it started when she accidentally walked in on her sister and that absolute buffoon of a Terran (half-Terran. Whatever. It was confusing.) in a state of undress. She wasn’t naïve, she knew what they had been doing in the only private corner of the hulking Ravager ship they called home, so when Gamora reached for her dress and stammered something about _shower schedules_ , she didn’t care. Of course they had been having sex. It was an inevitability. She only wished they’d thought to lock the damn door.

She went back up to the navigation area where Kraglin was working on the ship. The Ravager existed on the fringe of the Guardians’ little group, so there was the expectation of kinship between them. For her part, she didn’t care much, but she also didn’t _hate_ the skinny pirate as much as the rest of the crew.

He was halfway under a control console, fixing some random part of the ship. His usual jumpsuit had been abandoned, she guessed for the heat. He was skinnier without it, but not in a way that looked particularly frail. The handle of a knife was visible in his boot.

When he slid out from under the console, wiping sweat away, he caught her staring.

“Hey,” he said, reaching to grab a wrench. His tattoos were standing out against the slight sheen of sweat, and they went all the way from his neck to his hand on one side.

“Hey.”

That was it. There was no further expectation of conversation, and that’s why she could tolerate his presence more than her sister and those idiots she called her _family_.

\--

She struck out on her own soon after the incident with Gamora and Star-Munch, back to hunting down Thanos and getting her revenge. Her hatred had consumed her for so long, it was all she had. So when she settled down to sleep for the night, having found a habitable but sparsely populated moon to land on, she only intended to grab a few short hours of sleep.

Nebula dreamed often – she dreamt fury and fire and pain. Her nights were full of vengeance. Since Ego’s planet, Gamora had stopped being a regular fixture in the awful blackness of the dreams and had become some sort of…warmth. When the dream threatened to consume her, she heard her sister call to her. It felt safe. The worst dreams, they were in those caverns again, but the children weren’t dead, they were begging to be saved. Gamora was the one trapped in the burning wreckage of the M-ship, and for some reason Nebula couldn’t get to her.

So, she expected that any dream she had that night would follow the same path, consumed by nightmares.

However, it wasn’t a bad night.

Wherever she was, it was warm. It felt public, but there was no one else around. Where were all the people? Had Thanos killed them already?

No, it wasn’t like that. She felt…comfortable. Maybe a little too hot, but comfortable. She wasn’t in any danger tonight.

She heard something and turned.

It was Kraglin.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he said, then he gestured her over with his arms open. She understood this gesture – it was like what Gamora did every time she left now. A _hug_.

She hugged him.

That transitioned into something else entirely.

Nebula woke up breathing as though she had just run a long distance instead of gotten a full night’s sleep. She stared at the ceiling of her ship, uncomfortably warm and trying to process what happened.

She’d just had a sex dream.

About _Kraglin._

_\--_

Nebula fully blamed Gamora’s wanton showing with that idiot Terran for this. It had planted some kind of idea in her head.

She’d never even _thought_ of sex before then. It was something other people did. She was a monster, a killer, a puppet of Thanos. Things that weren’t essential to her survival had never been a priority.

But the dream kept popping up, every time she tried to shut her eyes. It had been an indistinct vision, just tattoos and pale, thin arms and her grabbing someone, in some nebulous, dreamlike environment. But she _knew_ what it was and couldn’t shake it. It was becoming a distraction.

\--

They were refueling on Knowhere (which was always a pain in the ass, because of the price), when Nebula found them. Kraglin was staying with the ship, because he didn’t feel like going out to scrounging for minor bounty jobs with Pete. Everyone else had scattered off to do whatever.

“Hey,” he said when he saw her sitting on the ship. He would be surprised, except this was like the fourth time she’d randomly showed up on his ship needing supplies and a few days’ rest.

Thanos’s daughter had stopped being an intimidating presence sometime after the funeral, and now he was just kind of used to it. He liked her, even. They got along.

But he really wasn’t expecting her to give him a long, stern look and say: “We need to have sex.”

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhh…”

“Is your brain short circuiting?” Nebula demanded. “Did the fox mis-install that implant? I can kill him for you.”

As nice of a gesture as that was, it wasn’t really the issue. “Me? Really? Not Mantis or Drax or -- ” he finally choked out. “Gamora would kill me.”

“I am an adult. I am _allowed_ to do these things,” she said, sounding a little too petulant to be making claims of adulthood.

“Not, not to be insultin’ or nothing, Nebula, but…have you ever actually _had sex_ before?”

“No. But I fail to see how that’s relevant.”

“Typically when you…well…the first time’s supposed to be…” Kraglin had no idea how to proceed with this. Giving Thanos’s daughter a talk on the emotional implications of having sex for the first time was not how he thought his night was gonna go, okay? He thought he was gonna nap or get some work done.

“If you do not want to, it is fine,” she said.

It wasn’t really a matter of wanting to or not, because sure, in a less weird world, he’d probably have thought about having sex with her long before now. “I mean…” He furrowed his eyebrows, thought about it for a long second, and gestured her over. “Sit down.”

Nebula walked over and sat down next to him, a few inches away, her body language tense. “What are you staring at me for?”

He averted his eyes. “You ain’t just supposed to do that kinda thing willy-nilly, ya know?” he said, trying to sound gentle instead of incredulous.

“How are you _supposed_ to do it?” she repeated back, a little mockingly.

“With someone ya trust or like,” he said. Then he paused. “Or paid, cuz money’ll keep ya from gettin’ stabbed.” This was the general rule on Ravager ships, at least. On Xandar, people were more prudish than you could afford to be on a Ravage galleon. He’d never really experienced the same kind of hang-ups as some people. Like Pete. He was promiscuous but there were still lines.

Nebula was frowning, staring at her feet. “I trust you. Not to stab me, at least.”

That was a big jolt of emotional sincerity from Nebula. Kraglin made up his mind.

“Right. Ok. If you’re sure. But if something you don’t like happens, you gotta just tell me and not try to kill me. Deal?” he said, sticking out his hand for her to shake. She took it, squeezing it in her cybernetic hand, but not hard.

Then he leaned forward, intending to initiate this ridiculousness, and she jerked back, startled. “What are you doing?”

“I was gonna kiss ya, but if ya don’t want me to ease into it you can just take your pants off and flip over,” he said, rolling his eyes and wondering what he’d just gotten himself into.

The joke went over her head. “Oh, right. Proceed.”

\--

Nebula was not winded after everything, but Kraglin was. They were lying down next to each other, neither sure if they should continue physical contact after what had just _happened_. He was on his stomach, the old captain’s red implant glowing on the back of his neck.

She reached up and touched it, maybe a little too roughly.

He twitched. “Attached to my brain,” he reminded her. She had accidentally grabbed it during the proceedings and he had jerked unpleasantly. It was smaller than the one the captain had worn, which seemed more strategically sound, though he probably lost something in range. She wasn’t sure why she was thinking about strategy now, when she was somewhat unpleasantly sticky, warm and tired.

She hadn’t been sure how functional her sex organs were, honestly, because it was something she’d never bothered with, and if Thanos had, she’d blocked that memory out.

Turns out, they worked okay. She wasn’t sure how they were supposed to work, but nothing had gone wrong. Or at least, she didn’t know well enough to know if it had or not.

It hadn’t quite been like the dream she’d had, but it had felt, at least, less eerily fleeting and ghostly. Undressing had been clumsy and awkward and had involved the removal of several knives, and the actual process had been frustratingly slow until she’d found her voice and started making demands.

The Ravager had been very receptive to _demands_ , and she watched him nearly doze off next to her with a foreign sort of fondness.

“Glad we got that over with,” she managed to say when he opened a blue eye and noticed her looking at him.

He rolled onto his side and held out a hand. “Up top, then.”

“What?”

“It’s something Quill does,” he said, a little self-conscious. “We’re supposed to slap hands. It’s like, to say ‘good job!’”

“That’s stupid,” she said as she slapped his hand, though she found the sensation kind of satisfying.

“What now?”

“Again?” she asked, though it was less a request and more a demand.

“Why the hell not.”

\--

Peter Jason Quill had never done anything wrong, ever, in his life. He’d never done anything to deserve anything.

When they got back from Knowhere, he couldn’t find their pilot. While sure, Rocket and him could easily pilot the Quadrant, or hell, he could just go unload the Milano from where they had docked it when they’d picked it up on Berhart, it was kind of important to make sure Kraglin was around, because they’d accidentally left him behind on a planet where he had a bounty on his head last week and he was feeling kind of guilty.

So he looked in the usual places, and found no sign of him.

He started opening doors. “Kraglin?”

“He might just be taking a nap,” Gamora suggested. “He’d have commed us if he’d left the ship this time.”

Peter knew she was right, but he was the captain and the captain needed to keep track of their crew. So when he pushed open the door to one of the private rooms that had been turned into a bedroom (but had previously been a storage room) and saw the aforementioned first mate pulling on a shirt, he thought maybe Gamora had been right about the nap.

Until Kraglin looked like he had been caught doing something terrible when their eyes met.

Peter did what every person (specifically, every obnoxious younger-sibling-figure) would in that situation, he barged into the room and got an eyeful of a partially cybernetic girl who was also zipping up a Ravager jumpsuit.

His brain started to short-circuit at about that point.

“Did you guys…I mean…did you spill something simultaneously on both of your clothes?” he asked, starting to taste copper. “Water balloon fight?”

Nebula looked almost concerned at his blabbering. “We had sex.”

“ _Why_ did you say that?” he yelled, almost in pain from the thought. What had he ever done to deserve the thought of his – his _Kraglin_ – having sex with the love of his life’s murderous sister?! Nothing! “Who’s cooking toast?”

Kraglin took Peter very gently by the shoulders and maneuvered him from the room while he tried to decide if he was stroking out or overreacting. “I thought we gave you the talk when you was a kid, Pete.”

“You violated my girlfriend’s little sister!” he whimpered.

And unfortunately that was the part of the conversation that Gamora heard. She didn’t even protest being called a girlfriend this time.

“ _What_?!”

“She _asked_ me to!” Kraglin said, holding up his hands.

“Oh.” Gamora’s face fell back into a neutral expression. “All right then.”

“How are you okay with this?” Peter all-but shouted. “Look at him! He’s…so dirty…”

“It’s none of your business anyway, Star-Prince!” Nebula snarled, having finally emerged from hiding. “I can do what I please.”

“Or who, apparently,” Kraglin said, and they high-fived and he laughed.

“I didn’t know bald, blue and mean was your type, Kraglin,” Rocket said, holding up his paw for a high-five. Groot ran up and completed the gesture, and this time everyone was laughing at Kraglin’s expense.

“You leaving to go kill Thanos?” he asked Nebula.

“Yes. Now that I’m no longer distracted.”

“Take me with you please.”


End file.
